Sweet Desert: Fixing Rage’s Texture Problems

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Alec and myself are busy playing Rage, and rather enjoying it, actually. That said, we had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the damned thing working ok. We both used the fix detailed here in combination with enabling the GPU transcoding thing, while also updating drivers (particularly important for ATi cards). This seems to address most of the texture pop-in issues, and apparently ups the texture res, too. You’ll ideally need a card with 1.5gb VRAM to get a step up in texture quality, and if you have 3gb or more it’s reportedly possible to go higher still, although this article on the Geforce site said they found no immediate differences. Anyone with enorm-VRAM able to confirm?

The user can force V-sync on or off in the graphics vendor control panel. Right-click on the desktop to access the graphics vendor control panel.
If V-sync is forced on then RAGE will always V-sync.
If V-sync is forced off then RAGE will auto-detect that V-sync is not working and RAGE will instead synchronize to real-time and screen tearing may occur.

Alternatively you can force V-sync on by adding the following to the RAGE launch options in Steam:

+r_swapInterval 1

The launch options can be found by right-clicking on RAGE in Steam and selecting “Properties”. Then click on “Set Launch Options” in the dialog that pops up.

Its not really a Vram issue its a bandwidth issue. The game has to get a massive sliced up texture from RAM to GPU every time the camera moves. It simply cannot move that amount of data in a single frame over current PCI bus speeds.

You need to overclock your PCI-E bus and see if that makes a difference. Although I wouldn’t recommend it if you have anything other than a GPU attached to PCI-E.

lol simoroth, you obviously don’t know what the bandwidth of current hardware is. Even on something as measly as a DDR2 dual channel config you’re running at 8gb/second, the PCI-Express 2.0 bridge is way beyond that. Overclock the PCI-Express port. That’s rich. You can’t get anything today that even stresses it to the max, and we’re already on PCIE 3.0 on new mobos.

@lionsphil It has to. Megatexturing doesnt work like current texture techniques, you can’t buffer stuff.

@PoulWrist As a graphics programmer, bandwidth is the main bottleneck.

8gb per second is nothing when you divide it up by 60 frames. Then you’ve got Colour, Spec, Spec power, normal, alpha, glow maps to push down that little pipe. We are talking hundreds of megs a frame. If the engine uses a deferred renderer you have even less space to cache textures that don’t need to be streamed so may need to stream them too.

Not to mention you need it there in the GPU *before rendering*, which will also take a lot of time. So it needs to get to the GPU in a tiny fraction of the 8-16ms you’ve got to render in.

Why the hell would they have an option to encode the textures if bandwidth wasn’t an issue?

@Brumisator: “But…but…that’s what PC gaming is all about! Tweaking and poking at the files until they do as you command!”

Yes. But when you have to do that just to get the game running in a playable state, it is not ok. Anyway, i can’t see why the PC should be blamed for this. id has great technical knowledge and a big budget. They could have made sure the game was released in a playable state on the PC. They did not.

This also demonstrates that PC gaming is rarely a “install and play” experience, especially with newest releases. You can’t just launch a game and enjoy it.

– You first check if it actually launches.
– Then you curse the game for throwing an introductory tutorial at you without giving you time to check options.
– Then you tinker with graphic options to find something appropriate for your configuration.
– Depending on your luck, your GPU, and the novelty of the game, you encounter dramatic performances, or texture problems, or other lovely crashes.
– You tinker more with your settings
– You go to the forums to see if people have the same issue.
– You try any esoteric solution from specific driver options, blocking CPUs, beta drivers, reinstalling the system, to dancing around the computer on one foot while singing voodoo prayers and clapping your hands.

Don’t get me wrong, I love PC gaming, but it’s clearly not a simple matter, for many “big” games.

I actually like tinkering, so does a lot of the community. But developers recently seem to enjoy making this harder, like for example by encrypting config files, or not giving access to the most obvious graphic settings.

It can be tricky getting PC games to run properly, but it doesn’t seem half as much trouble as it was even a few years back for me. Certainly helps that on Steam at least I get regular patches from most developers for weeks after release instead of having to scour the web and make a fileplanet account to track down patches.

I think the last dozen fresh PC games I ran actually went smoothly without any observable bugs, if only after a helpful automatic release day patch. By comparison these little occult rituals seem a far smaller inconvenience then sitting through a 40 hour AAA game without any anti-aliasing. It’s positively barbaric how many console games cut that corner.

Malbogio: “Certainly helps that on Steam at least I get regular patches from most developers for weeks after release instead of having to scour the web and make a fileplanet account to track down patches.”

Heh. That’s where Fileplanet missed a trick. If they’d come up with a downloadable program that tracked what games you had on your system and passed you patches through it when they became available then maybe Steam would have had a fight on it’s hands. Ah, 20/20 hindsight. :)

Sheng-ji: “Oh I agree, but when your game is working, modded to your exact tastes it makes it all worthwhile.

Precisely! It’s the exact same thing as customising a car. You can buy easy, off-the-shelf versions if you don’t want the hassle (console), but putting your stamp on something makes it yours in a way that nothing else can. Most PC Gamers love tinkering with their games – I certainly do because I want to make the game experience the best for me and my system. I wish more developers understood that and stopped trying to make their games ‘ABC’, ‘one-click’ simple all the time because in doing so they ruin half the fun.

I love how people seem to think that this is akin to modding. Modding is about expanding or modifying the base gameplay experience to create new gameplay experiences. What we’re doing here is fixing something that is blatantly broken. I didn’t get off on playing with sound config options to find the proper combination in the DOS days, and I’m not having fun crawling through console commands to get something to run properly in 2011.

Total Time spent browsing and downloading – 1h25m
Total time spent tinkering: 20m5s

Total time spent not playing the game: Aprox. 2 hours

Total gameplay added to game: I would estimate an average to be 50 hours (Disregarding Minecraft as a statistical anomaly, otherwise it would drag the average up into the thousands of hours, I’m quite sure)
Monies spent: £0

Hurrah for PC gaming and tinkering! Mrs Doyle is amazing too!

@soldant – It’s not “Broken”, it’s just not configured for your exact hardware/software out of the box. If you’re tech savvy, it’s fairly simple, if your not, and this was the point of my post, it takes hours generally before someone somewhere in the world shares how to get it working with your hardware in the way you want it to. At the risk of expanding on a potentially irrelevant simile, the car one, if you just want to get from A-B (Play the game) then buy an off the shelf car from a mainstream dealership (Console) If you want a sublime driving experience, choose your make and model of car carefully (Your hardware) and tweak it to give you the best possible driving experience, in your opinion (Er… tweak and mod your game). But don’t go through all that if you just want to drive to work every day!

Of course you can buy a “Broken”(sic) car like the Noble M600, any TVR etc and just struggle on with it as is, but don’t complain if you don’t want to get your hands dirty fixing it up when you could have just bought a focus and been done with. But you bought the Noble/TVR etc to get the very best driving experience currently available to anyone in the world, right? Because with a bit of tinkering, that’s what you’ll get!

I didn’t get off on playing with sound config options to find the proper combination in the DOS days, and I’m not having fun crawling through console commands to get something to run properly in 2011.

Hear fucking hear.

This reminds me of damn Linux zealots; especially Gentoo. “Oh, it’s so rewarding having to spend hours tweaking things to make them work.” Yeah, great, you get to learn something related to your hobby and feel a bit clever.

After then tenth fucking time, I want it to just bloody work, though. I want to play the game, not play “make the game work properly”.

I think you want everything – you want PC gaming, which the benefits of which include being able to choose your hardware and software setup, but you also want it to just run, out of the box, like a console game. The reality is, you can’t have that. But there are several answers, without telling you to buy a console –

1) Wait a few days/weeks/months for the patches and driver updates to be implemented (You do keep your computer up to date regardless of whether games are running or not, right?)

2) Limit yourself to games which do work perfectly on your machine, use demo’s, beta trials etc to do a free test of this.

It might not be what you want to hear, but trust me, if I could make every game work perfectly on everyone’s computer, I would. I can’t and it seems no-one has thought of a way to do this yet, so we have to work within the system we have. Just know that you can indeed have a world where every game does just work, but you may be limited in your choice of games or need to buy a console.

It’s perhaps worth pointing out that I am not going to be buying Rage, because I don’t think that the effort I would need to put into this game to get it working properly will be rewarding enough for me – I just don’t really feel the need to rage about it (geddit?)

I am honestly VERY curious about what hardware ID tested and developed this game on. My room mate has a GeForce 560 in his machine, and gets tearing, popping, and what not.. i’ve got a GeForce 240, and get far less popping, but I’ve also got a much faster CPU.
But I watched those gameplay videos, and there was nothing of the sort.. high res textures everywhere… no popping, no tearing, no slowdowns.

So did they not test this on any hardware but their primary kit?

Really though trying to produce a game for /all/ systems out there is a near impossibility, too many configurations, too many weird drivers, too many lazy gamers. But wtf, it didnt even remotely work right on an AMD card? that is just a complete miss, there should have been atleast ONE testbox in their office that had a medium range ATI/AMD card in it.

“his also demonstrates that PC gaming is rarely a “install and play” experience, especially with newest releases. You can’t just launch a game and enjoy it. ”

I’d say that’s exaggerating a fair amount. The only time that’s really an issue is with bad ports, and recently. I’ve played rogue spear, starcraft, league of legends, quake 3, quake 1, counter-strike, left 4 dead, and probably more I’m forgetting, but we never have had a substantial ‘oh shits what is happening’ problem.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but the idea it’s the norm is unrealistic to me. Sure, it’s a problem with crappy ports, but the same can be said of crappy console games. See: trying to play MP in Ghostbusters.

That’s great to hear that you’re actually enjoying the game so far. Disappointed those guys in the screen-grab aren’t playing hopscotch like I first thought. That’s what I’ll be doing after the apocalypse. Looking forward to WITs/Verdict.

Came across the same fix you’ve pointed out and it’s worked wonders. Night and day really. There seem to be some other config files floating around but they’re a bit of a mess. They seem to take the kitchen sink approach (even going so far as to force an aspect ratio of 16:10 twice over, something I can’t see the reason for especially as my monitor runs at 16:9).

I never thought of id as some massive company out to dominate the market, rather a few guys doing what they love. With their success came the usual issues, Carmack ruled with tech which put gameplay innovation as a less important aspect, people splintered off. I reckon they’ve been trying to get themselves together for a number of years now, at least that’s what it looks like. The whole being bought out thing, hiring many more people, etc.
Rage is really their first game as a “modern” company.

I can’t deny that I feel a bit of disappointment about Rage and how it plays. Technically its marvelous (and I have yet to tryout any of the aforementioned fixes) but the gameplay/gunplay is lackluster and the racing aspect hasn’t wowed me yet. I’m only 2 hours in and still hold out tons of hope that it’ll all come together but Im starting to think id are more great tech developers and less great game makers these days.

I’m cringing just thinking that as Doom will forever be my favorite game of all time!

Ah, sweet irony! Turning one’s back from a game because it’s too bug-riddled at launch, and turning to New Vegas, of all places, instead! (Which, after all, means that there’s hope for Rage, too, I guess.)

Doom 3, as most of you know, also had an “ultra” graphical setting, for cards with 512MB of VRAM, cards which did not yet exist when the game launched in 2004. I think id tried pulling the same stunt again, but kind of failed to be understood.

Oh my, this fix really helped the texture issue for me! Even with just a measly 1 GB of VRAM, I can use the 8129 textures just fine and it looks brilliant. Only problem I have now is that the game crashes on certain loading screens, sigh. For all the decrying everyone’s done of Id and Carmack, I refuse to give in. What little I’ve gotten to play has been a blast.

Surely getting PC games to work right and look nice is half the fun?! No? Well it is for me!

Rage pre-ordered and awaiting delivery for tomorrow (Stupid UK). So far i have been um-ming and ah-ing over wether to cancel it or not but…….now im just exited….. thought a bit peeved the main missions only equate to (depending on which review site you read) anywhere between 8 – 12 hours. Was hoping for much much more than this :/

SLI didn’t work but resulted in far lower FPS than when I played only using a single GPU (we’re talking about 17 FPS with SLI vs 60 FPS on Single GPU). And enabling GPU Transcode made the FPS grind to a halt, especially when I had configured the game to only use a Single GPU. Why? Because for some reason it used the other card to do the processing… While it sounds great (one card does rendering, the other only the texture math) it for some reason resulted in 10 FPS lower in certain bigger scenes.

I’ve used the lovely memory changes which results in more detailed environment but overall on a slightly closer look the textures are still sub par. What I can’t stand is that the game NEVER uses more than 300 MB of my available VRAM, nor more than 50% of my GPU. The components are there to be used, there’s no wonder why the game looks like a straight console port when it doesn’t even utilize what it can utilize.

Also, I’ve noticed glitches in the engine’s lightning that can result in the whole world being far more dark or light with a single step backwards or forward… Not fun, not fun indeed. Not to mention that the enemy models stands out far too much in darker areas. While a surrounding place in a room can be dark, the model of the enemy is far brighter as if it was standing in the middle of sunshine. Not cool.

Then there’s a couple of other problems and stuff. Such as having the game installed on a SSD yet I still got noticeable texture streaming problems and alike.

This game has some sort of genuine identification disorder. I’ve disabled SLI yet the game still uses the other graphic card at times. That is the main reason why I can get a magical FPS of 0 or 1 when I’m using certain parameters to the engine. The rendering/texture/math/streaming/whatever is divided between both GPUs (albeit I’ve disable the shit) and all hell breaks loose simply because the engine tries to do stuff it clearly aren’t designed to do.

Yeah I found this out too. Even after disabling SLI through control panel, I still saw activity on my second GPU. I kept wondering why people with lower system specs were getting this ’60fps’ no matter what experience. While mine would jitter in certain places with texture pop in. Disabling GPU transcoding and allowing my CPU (980x) to do the work led to a flawless experience. On one 580 at 2560 x 1600 and even spoiling myself with 8 x AA the game is rock solid smooth performance wise. There are still sub par textures to deal with but the lack of options or clarification at launch was shocking.

considering how ‘new’ this sort of tech is, and how many problems seem to be coming from so many different variations of PC and drivers, WHY wasnt this given some form of Open Beta to test it out?
even if it was an unplayable benchmark loop, it would have given people the chance to see performance, and see OBVIOUS bugs.

Considering Carmack said it was a mistake to put so much focus on the console versions, and they were careful to restrict showing off the PC version, my guess is they knew for a while that the PC version was going to blow up when it went public. And they decided it was better to keep it out of sight until after the game shipped, they got their money, and PC gamers had more incentive to keep at it until they got the game working.

I’m annoyed at the number of games that don’t contain anything beyond the most basic graphics configuration options. By all means do your magical guessary (guessary is like trickery but with guessing) and recommend a set of detail levels but give us an Advanced Options button that allows us to enable/disable all the little tweaks and bobbins that we have grown used to and for the love of grud stop relying on good natured members of the community to do your work and find out arcane ways to tweak your game to get acceptable performance.

Rage is a shambles and iD should be embarassed to have released it in this shoddy state. If I look at their website I see this:

link to bethblog.comWe’re currently working on an update that will allow you to more easily make configuration changes… should have more details on that shortly.

Really? I doubt it came as a surprise to you that people wanted this crazy new-fangled feature.

With config settings and command line parameters and the atioglxx.dll from the rage drivers it finally works… somewhat. There are still the crashes and that damn flickering stuff, or weapon parts and eyes floating next to the models they belong to. And those damn console menus suck.

This runs fine on my 8800GT. In fact it looks really good (granted, that doesn’t help those with problems). I just don’t think it is very well paced. There’s a 5 minute sequence right at the beginning where all you get to do is look at a Doom bobblehead (a gag that wears off pretty quickly) and listen to someone blather on in a monotone about what a great favour he’s doing you.

Graphically it’s impressive, but so far (yes I have only played for 10 minutes and thus my opinion is probably worthless) the gameplay seems to be the issue.

I’m just going to wait a couple weeks for all the patches to be patched and so forth, and then grab the latest through Steam. My laptop is already relatively ancient*, so I don’t expect to be able to run it at full settings. Thus, I’m not messing with hardware settings or whatever for this one.

*But still has better specs than an XBox 360. Except the GPU is a bit naff. Which is why not-highest-settings.

Dunno if you recall previous id games, but they’ve never been hot on graphical settings. Quake 3 has resolution, bit depth, a slider with 3 nudges for texture quality, a texture filter setting and what lighting model you want to use.

Doom 3 and Quake 4 have about the same amount. Dunno where you got the rest from. id games have always been easy to setup, but had the console for those who wanted to fiddle around with all the options. Which I guess is how Rage is going on with it as well. It’s always been an id philosophy to make the graphics stuff as easy for the user as possible. In Doom 3 interviews back in the day Carmack highlighted an improved “autodetect system” feature for easy and accurate system setup.

“Dunno if you recall previous id games, but they’ve never been hot on graphical settings. Quake 3 has resolution, bit depth, a slider with 3 nudges for texture quality, a texture filter setting and what lighting model you want to use.

Doom 3 and Quake 4 have about the same amount.”

So… What you’re saying is, all of these previous id games had more options than RAGE? They might not have had all of the oodles and oodles of options of other games, but they’ve always had more than RAGE.

And that still doesn’t change the fact they let the game go out the door with some serious f*cking issues.

These guys really are pushing the boundaries, redefining the entire industry as we know it, beating even Obsidian broken-mess-releasing-wise. So, can we call this the release clusterfuck of the year already?

More I read the luckier I guess I am :/. I’ve had no problems playing the game, runs like a charm. There is a small, small, amount of texture popping of I swing around really fast. But I’m pretty sure my friends 360 version is the same.

Running a Q6600 cpu (quad core OCed to 3ghz/core) and 5850 (OCed to 850/1200). After installing the ATI driver update, forcing VSync in steam launch options, and using the custom cfg file above, everything seems to be running beautifully. I’m only noticing blurring of the textures very rarely, if I turn extremely quickly. Not enough to bother me. Frame rate is smooth with no drops (would guess 40-50fps) and everything looks beautiful. All good then. Too bad it didn’t launch in this state, but at least the issues were easily fixed for me.